Book of the Week - Mapping New York

      Mapping New York provides a look at historical and present day New York City through cartography. Black Dog Publishing has recently released this book as a follow up to their previous title, Mapping London.  The publishing company has allowed me to include some images from the book. They have offered me and any readers of this blog copies at a 40% discount--send an e-mail to jess@blackdogonline.com quoting ‘Map of the Week Offer’ as the subject.
        This book starts with a history of the city beginning with a few maps showing a small village at the tip of Manhattan Island extending northwards to the city's wall at present day Wall Street. Urban development and planning maps detail the growth of the city and of its transportation network. Below is part of Oscar Hinrich's "Guide Map of Central Park" from the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. The map was drawn 16 years after the park's opening and two years after its completion.

     Later chapters show maps from artistic and political perspectives. Below is a map titled "Routes of Least Surveillance" courtesy of The Institute of Applied Autonomy and Site-R. The red dots show the locations of CCTV cameras and the green lines indicate walking paths that minimize your exposure to them. Ordinary folks with legitimate reasons to be concerned about these cameras are detailed at the edges of the map.

         Here is a clever ad for the SONY Walkman.  The image is courtesy of Sony and the ad's creators, Saatchi and Saatchi Sydney. The subway stations represent musical groups.

Here is a detail from the map.

      The book concludes with some various "imaginings" of the city from artists, social scientists and others with many more interesting and unique maps.

Map of the Week-The Olympics GeoView

I love the Olympics. Especially the Winter Games. However, the Official Vancouver 2010 site seems to lack a basic map showing the various event locations. Each venue has a diagram and map of the immediate area but there's nothing that shows the whole picture*. For example, where is Cypress Mountain? Is it on the way to Whistler? These are the kind of questions that maybe only I care about.
*Note: it turns out there are some better maps - see update at the end of this post

There is an interactive map but when you click it you get this googly mess:

It's way too busy (until you use the filters) and you have to click each site to get the name. Also when you click a site it changes your view to accommodate the large block of googleized text.

OK - enough complaining. What they do have that is interesting is the GeoView. This is an interactive world map showing the countries by medal count, events and number of athletes with various filters. So for example you can see the number of ski jumpers per country or the total number of female athletes in the 1984 Olympics. Here are the countries by total number of athletes at the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France.

This is the same map for the 2010 Olympics.

I also like the cute sustainability diagrams. Here is one for Whistler Creekside. An explanation is here.

And of course who can't resist the Google Earth views with building models?




 


Or the Google street views?

Finally, here is the current medal count (subject to change at any minute).

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Update (Feb 25th) :

There are some decent maps after all. I'd like to think they made these available because I complained, but probably they've been up on the site all along. They're just difficult to find. You have to go to the Transportation section of the site. These are large Acrobat .pdf files that may take some time to download. Here are the thumbnail images.

Same Geography-Dozens of Viewpoints

As a cartographer, I often wonder how many different ways the same space can be represented. CloudMade is an organization that allows you to access web mapping content and tools. They have a large set of cartographic styles to color your world. Here are 15 different views of the same area in London using some of their styles.

Here is an animation I created using 29 styles. Click it for a more clear image - it will take you to my photobucket site.





All the styles can be seen on their style editor page. You can take these templates anywhere. Here are three views of Trenton, New Jersey using the "Emo Style" template.